This Saturday a hardy group of CUOCers braved a frosty predawn start, and the notorious X5 bus to attend the Oxf*rd City race. Sam, Emma, Paul and Jonathan plus the DrongOs Tom Dobra and Ben all got on the first bus of the day at 0710. The best part of the journey was fitting a trendline to a well ordered group photo from the DrongO trip to Venice, read all about that here. In the end we all survived Bedford and only arrived ~15 mins late.
The race itself was good fun- it was very similar to the Cambridge City Race, only not as good (obviously). The route took us through 3 colleges and on a good tour of the city, highlights included some very atmospheric bells in Magdalen College, a control on the famous Bridge of Sighs, and some rather intense crowd swimming in the city centre.
Everyone had good runs, and were quite happy with the results. Paul didn't do quite as amazingly as usual, his excuse was that urban races "aren't proper orienteering". Meanwhile Jonathan made lots of silly mistakes, even asking the Magdalen porters for directions at one point, although somehow managed to finish in a reasonable 22nd.
There was a strong DrongO turnout too, with lots of really good results for them. Ben won the Men's Open with James Hoad coming in a close 3rd, and Sarah Gales was 3rd in the Women's Open. Here are the results
After the race we went out for a well deserved pub lunch, where we all tucked into some great veggie food. After the long day, we were very relived that James Hoad was kindly able to give us lifts back to Cambridge. On the way back Jonathan got a surprising amount of his C++ done, and Paul got a surprising amount of sleeping done.
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